Mickey Owen, the Brooklyn Dodger catcher remembered for a misadventure in the 1941 World Series that propelled the Yankees to the championship and overshadowed his All-Star career, died Wednesday at a nursing home in Mount Vernon, Missouri. He was 89.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son, Charles, said.
Owen played for 13 seasons in the major leagues and was an outstanding catcher with a strong, accurate arm. But he has been linked in baseball history with figures like Fred Merkle, Ralph Branca and Bill Buckner, all outstanding players defined by a single moment of misfortune.
On the afternoon of Oct. 5, 1941, the Yankees were trailing the Dodgers, 4-3, at Ebbets Field in Game 4 of the World Series and were down to their final out with Brooklyn about to tie the Series at two games apiece. Tommy Henrich, the Yankees' star outfielder, was at the plate facing the ace reliever Hugh Casey, with nobody on base and a full count.
Casey threw a pitch that broke sharply, and Henrich swung and missed. The home-plate umpire, Larry Goetz, signaled a strikeout and the game was seemingly over.
But the pitch hit the heel of Owen's glove and skipped away for a passed ball. As Owen chased the ball near the Dodgers' dugout, Henrich raced to first base. Joe DiMaggio followed with a single to left, then Charlie Keller hit a ball high off the right-field screen, scoring Henrich and DiMaggio and giving the Yankees a 5-4 lead.
After Bill Dickey walked, Joe Gordon doubled to make the score 7-4. The Dodgers went down quickly in the ninth, and the Yankees had a lead of three games to one. They captured the World Series the next day, inspiring the enduring headline in The Brooklyn Eagle, "Wait Till Next Year."
Vindication was a long time coming for the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees four more times in the World Series before defeating them in 1955 for their only championship in Brooklyn.
Owen dismissed speculation that Casey's fateful delivery was a spitball.
"Casey had two kinds of curveballs," he told Dave Anderson of The New York Times in 1988. "One was an overhand curve that broke big. The other one was like a slider, it broke sharp and quick. But we had the same sign for either one. He just threw whichever one was working best. When we got to 3 and 2 on Tommy, I called for the curveball. I was looking for the quick curve he had been throwing all along. But he threw the overhand curve, and it really broke big, in and down. Tommy missed it by six inches."
As Henrich remembered the moment: "As soon as I missed it, I looked around to see where the ball was. It fooled me so much, I figured maybe it fooled Mickey, too. And it did."
Owen feared he would be a pariah for Brooklyn fans, but he was evidently forgiven. "I got about 4,000 wires and letters," he told W.C. Heinz in the Saturday Evening Post on the 25th anniversary of the passed ball. "I had offers of jobs and proposals of marriage. Some girls sent their pictures in bathing suits, and my wife tore them up."
Owen maintained that he was not bothered by the barbs over his World Series miscue. As he put it long afterward, "I would've been completely forgotten if I hadn't missed that pitch."
Arnold Malcolm Owen, a native of Nixa, Missouri, made his major league debut with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1937 and was traded to the Dodgers before the 1941 season. He handled 476 consecutive chances without an error in 1941, setting a single-season National League record for catchers, and he was an All-Star for four consecutive years before entering the Navy early in 1945.
After leaving military service, Owen jumped to the Mexican League in 1946 and was among more than a dozen major leaguers suspended from organized baseball until 1949 for doing so. He later played for the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox and had a career batting average of .255. After his playing days, he founded the Mickey Owen Baseball School in Miller, Missouri, and served as sheriff of Greene County in Missouri.
In addition to Charles Owen, of Mount Vernon, Missouri, he is survived by three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Gloria, died in 1994.
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